thousand words, and music expresses what language cannot. The medium maintains a certain level of abstraction by

excluding dialogue, narration, and lyrics.

John Swank (b. 1989, Chicago)

The everyday use of the word ‘story’ connotes a narrative, including a beginning, middle, and ending, that together create a comprehensible story.

Not all comprehensible stories can be put into words. Think, for example, of when someone ends a story by saying, “You had to be there.” The salient parts of some stories are missing when told in words.

Using electricity as a metaphor, words are not always functional conductors for the electricity of stories.

But, if the same stories were told in videos, the salience might be retained.

Without words, stories do not need to conform to narrative in order to be comprehensible.

For my recital, I wanted to create a story without words or narrative; a story that could not even be put into words, but could be comprehended when experienced. To do this, I compiled segments of video that I thought told comprehensible and compelling stories visually.

The next step after compiling video segments was to compose original music, and also adapt music I had written before ever conceiving of this project.